Carol Bove

Maccarone is pleased to present Carol Bove's RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?, the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, opening September 7th and on view through October 19th, 2013.

In conjunction with Bove's sculptural arrangement of metals, found material and concrete at 630 Greenwich Street, she and Philip Smith have curated Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates - a parallel exhibition at 98 Morton Street of recently discovered artwork and materials from the Lionel Ziprin archive.

These presentations share a common denominator, their close proximity conjuring up the metonymic measures and enigmatic core of the uncontainable and ever-shifting nature of the abstract gesture.

Bove's glyphs are large curvilinear structures of enameled steel, first conceived as a version of generic outdoor "plop art". Her I-beam sculptures are the hard-edged, right angle foils to the glyphs, utilizing a customary industrial material designed to provide structure and bear heavy loads. The Ibeams recur, in one work holding upright a large specimen of petrified wood, and again in the rectangular sculpture, Flora's Garden II, on top of which a pattern of stacked, congruent brass cubes shares an edge. Another large-scale block of concrete interwoven by fractal brass cubing traces the minute to the monolithic. The works formalize a consideration of binaries, where the organic, the handcrafted, and the industrial are brought together.

The disaggregated, damaged components of Flora's Garden II are presented in a neighboring vitrine. At the center of the gallery hovers a large glass wall displaying a painting by Harry Smith; other works by Richard Berger, Joanne Ziprin, and unattributed Ziprin archive drawings are resuscitated here as installation components. The interplay between artwork and information becomes a laboratory for contemplation of all these collinear formulas. As Cathleen Chaffee writes in Bove's latest publication, The Middle Pillar, "[Bove's] exhibitions register the drift between art and non-art. For Bove, the murky, often seemingly magical passage from thing to art object, from collectable to readymade, is not a permanent transformation-any more than an installation is a unique, static, fetishized moment in time. The memory of each exhibition is being altered and re-written, as new works are read backwards against the past and come to change its meaning."

Carol Bove was born in 1971, raised in Berkeley, California and currently lives and works in New York. Bove has exhibited internationally, in solo exhibitions at The Common Guild in Glasgow, The Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Blanton Art Museum in Austin, the Kunsthalle in Zurich, the ICA in Boston, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg. She has participated in Documenta 13, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Current NYC solo exhibitions include Carol Bove: The Equinox, at The Museum of Modern Art, and Carol Bove: Caterpillar, High Line Art.